Liberalism is the real "irony poisoning"
Rebecca Rothfeld, writing for The Washington Post, has written an extraordinarily depressing take on “How coconuts and irony helped Democrats take back the meme wars.” Depressing mostly because it’s yet another symptom of a point I made yesterday: in lieu of a compelling substantive agenda, Democrats are having to fall back on superficial and unreliable messaging about how hip and cool they are and how “weird” Republicans have become. Unfortunately for Democrats, this comms strategy is destined to be a victim of its own success: there is absolutely nothing that can kill a meme or internet catchphrase faster than outlets like The Washington Post writing about it.
But even more depressing than that, to me at least, is how unironic all of this is. There is not actually anything unexpected about American leftists, at the very last moment, rationalizing a way to conclude that Democrats are in some sense cool and good enough to vote for. It’s literally what most do every two or four years!
Consider this quote from Know Your Enemy’s Matthew Sitman:
Matthew Sitman, co-host of the popular leftist podcast “Know Your Enemy,” told me that he added the coconut and tree emojis to his bio on X to “signal my newfound enthusiasm for Kamala Harris,” but added that this enthusiasm was “tinged with irony.” “It’s kind of complicated,” he said. “I haven’t actually been persuaded that Kamala Harris is amazing, but she’s an immense relief to me. My enthusiasm…it’s for Harris, yes, but it’s also for a human being who can string sentences together and could actually beat Donald Trump.”
I don’t mean to single Matthew out because, again, his politics are probably much closer to the majority of the left than mine are. But does anyone in the universe really think that he was not going to find a way to vote for Harris in the end? Matthew may say that he’s “no Vote Blue No Matter Who partisan,” and this seems to be true in the sense that he isn’t going around bullying people about it — but he voted for Hillary, he voted for Biden, and I would put money down that he will end up voting for literally anyone the Democrats nominate in 2028.
Or consider comments like this, which was leaked to me from the pro-Kamala chat of a reasonably well-known leftist pundit:
The big tell here is the “semi”: even as she tries to tell a story of how these epic lefties went from ironically joking about Kamala Harris to falling in love with her, the poster can’t help but concede that maybe there wasn’t any real irony going on in the first place.
Remember the last “ironic” pro-Democrat meme that we heard was sweeping the nation - Dark Brandon? That bit, coined by Sebastian Loreti and popularized by liberals celebrating yet another American drone strike, eventually found its way onto left Twitter too among posters like Ettingermentum. On the left, this was usually delivered in a kind of jokey half-earnest-half-sarcastic tone, but there’s a reason why we stopped seeing the meme late last year: after Israel and then his embarrassing presidential campaign, it stopped being acceptable on the left to hype Biden.
But this shift points us to what was really going on — because when leftists used the Dark Brandon meme, there was nothing “ironic” about it. They were hyping him as a badass, and they knew it, and that’s why they stopped even doing it “ironically” once his presidency became too villainous even for their tastes.
The irony scare
I am not the first to argue that contemporary American leftists often use irony (or “semi irony”) to veil their actual political commitments, but the critique that preceded me was otherwise quite different. Starting in 2017, with Clinton’s attacks on socialists as crypto-bigots still echoing loudly through the discourse, it became widely accepted among liberals and left squishes alike that socialists were using “irony” to hide their secret love of fascism. One of the most outspoken proponents of this line was podcaster Kumars Salehi:
It is true that the left has (like liberals) always harbored a statistically inevitable number of reactionaries, but six years later the problems with this line of criticism are obvious. First, none of the most well-known left-to-right defectors — Glenn Greenwald, Angela Nagle, Lee Fang, Aimee Terese, and so on — have ever been particularly celebrated for their irony. On the contrary, Nagle and Terese have always been quite earnest in their reactionary bomb-throwing, while Greenwald and Fang only speak with contempt about “irony leftists.” Meanwhile, the most popular targets of this line of criticism — the hosts of Chapo Trap House or trolls like Matt Bruenig and yours truly — never actually made the leap to the GOP that our critics were predicting.
(Tangent: at one point this critique of “irony” got so overheated that I can remember two distinct essays by DSA members arguing that irony was intrinsically reactionary. If anyone remembers this essay or can find it, I would be eternally grateful for a link, because I think about it a lot.)
Ultimately the problem with the red-brown “irony left” criticism is the same one that afflicts most other red-brown critiques: there just aren’t many leftists who are secret fascists since their politics are so different. Leftists are anticapitalist, egalitarian, internationalist, and democratic; fascists are capitalist, supremacist, nationalist, and dictatorial. The wideness of this gap is why red-brown critiques so often devolve into ridiculous conspiracy theories, usually involving guilt by two or third degree association; that a lot of leftists are really fascists who are cleverly advancing their right-wing politics through the register of irony is just another stretch of the imagination.
Liberal irony poisoning
Red-blue politics, however, are another matter. Unlike fascists, liberals are at least ostensibly egalitarian, democratic, and internationalist. Moreover, whereas fascists view socialism as politically intolerable, liberals like to imagine themselves magnanimously tolerating it for the greater-good sake of a popular front. Some liberals will even give lips service to preferring socialism, even if they for various reasons think it temporarily impossible or inadviseable.
Liberals often have, then, an ambivalence towards socialism that makes the polysemy of irony a perfect fit. The liberal can wear a zany Socialists For Pritzker t-shirt one moment and soak in the cultural cache of socialist iconography, a cache earned through its radical opposition to the capitalist system; and then the next, he can make arguments about how we need to vote for Democrats like Pritzker rather than their socialist opponents for lesser-evil reasons. And this is not an unusual situation that you need to resort to conspiracy theories about a red-brown political horseshoe to explain; “leftists who support Democrats” is so common that they write about it in the Washington Post.
The supposed left-to-fascist pipeline has never played a significant role in American politics, but the left-to-liberal pipeline is everywhere. It is even considered a normal part of the American experience, to the point of cliche: when you are young and idealistic you become a college communist, but as you grow older and wiser you realize the importance of incentivizing small business growth among marginalized communities through targeted tax breaks. And culturally, irony liberalism is a major vehicle for this transition.
Nothing kills a party like criticizing people for their jokes and precious memes, so I have no doubt that this post will be met with a lot of the same “relax” and “stop taking everything so seriously” responses that posts like this usually get. On one hand, I am tempted to respond that this is just the passive-aggression of irony liberalism at work: left Kamalaheads may think they are yukking it up, but they also clearly see themselves as engaged in the very important and serious work of defeating Trump and socialist challengers alike.
But on the other hand, I think I’ll just return to the point I started with: one of the biggest problems with irony liberalism is that it inevitably kills the joke. I used to laugh when I first came across Kamala Harris’s original coconut tree comments, but now when I watch the clip all I can think about is legacy journalists talking about how this means Democratic politics are cool again. This is the great irony of irony liberalism: the politics suck, and even the jokes aren’t funny.